The Underside of Politics: Global Fictions in the Fog of the Cold War

2 / The Vicissitudes of Popular Sovereignty

This chapter first analyzes Milan Kundera's novel The Joke (1967). It argues that the novel constructs a narrative economy that establishes complex links between the erotic and the political in the context of Cold War discourse. The discussion then turns to Philip Roth's novel I Married a Communist, one of the most eloquent examples in American contemporary fiction of what Kundera called the “privatization” of the political. It is argued that I Married a Communist is not only a Cold War text, but is also a novel about the legitimacy of pragmatic selfishness in American culture.